3D Print Shop

Informational Guide on the Duskwork's 3D Print Shop and trivia on previous usage from the Ad Astra Landings.

The Ad Astra Landings flew to Mars with a massive building kit with the design for an industrial, space-ready building printer. During its inauguration on Mars, it was used to create a variety of buildings that originally set up the Ad Astra Development Zone. The buildings it once created out grew it in size and traditional building methods were needed for the newer and larger buildings were needed. Now, the 3D print shops has been re-configured as a sort of massive machine shop, manufacturing PVC pipes, electronics, and structural parts.

The Duskwork's 3D print shop functions much more like the newer Ad Astra Development Zone 3D Print shops with the ability to manufacture PVC Pipes, electronic parts, and structural parts from metals smelted from a Smelting Module. These were also reconfigured to take in power cells instead of being directly connected to the Martian power-grid.

3D Print Shop is a very useful building to have on your plot. You can produce PVC pipes, electronic parts, paper, and structural parts in the 3D Print Shop.

Electrical bits, as they are colloquially known, are usually found as scrap from broken down electronics, they aren't difficult to manufacture on its own though, as wires can be used as its electrical components with a shell of treated iron.

They're useful for tinkering as well, a circuit board, a few electronic bits including a resistor and LED, along with a simple battery offers you one of the simplest circuit designs. Even as I write this document, just below the habitation window that looks out to the red surface, I can see electronic bits scattered across my desk.

- Katherine Collins

Power, electricity, whatever you call it, its everywhere in our increasingly digital world. From your holo-wrist devices, to the fake window screens showing vistas of Earth. You're never really grateful for the power you have until its taken away, much like a clear nose is only appreciated when you have a stuffy nose.

That's why these exist, the battery backups. Installed onto every habitation module, its used in place of any electrical fault and turns on seemingly before any problems arise due to its direct in-line voltage reading. It flicks on once the current dips even a small amount. This recipe isn't exactly approved by the Duskworks company, but if need be, you can overcharge power cells with circuit components and rover wires to a higher capacity.

- Katherine Collins

Machine Shop

Informational Guide on the Duskwork's Machine Shop and trivia on previous usage from the Ad Astra Landings.

The machine shop was another pivotal building, a marker like the steam engine of the industrial age. Having a building capable of producing more advanced metal parts onto the sister planet was regarded as one of the highest achievements in the decade. This fame did not come for no reason, as the machine shop is what allowed the Ad Astra Development Zone to create the massive amounts of rovers that currently preside over the surface. It was influential enough to even have its own statue displayed predominantly in the industrial district off of one of Ad Astra's oldest town.

The Duskwork's machine shop, much like most of it's machinery bears a striking resemblance to the original machine shops used in the Ad Astra landings. It however was outfitted with the ability to weld more advanced rover parts and the fabrication of metal plates, a small difference from the original usage of the machine shop during the Ad Astra time.

Let's see how the Machine Shop works!

Disassemble Gen 2 Solar Panel

These recipes will destroy your solar panel and taken directly from your inventory.

Sometimes, you have to throw things out, and sometimes, you don't want it to go to waste. While solar panels are incredibly useful on the red planet, sometimes you have too many and want to have their components instead. The Duskworks company has released documentation on how to carefully dismantle these solar panels in order to reclaim as much material as possible.

I'll still miss that poor solar panel though.

- Katherine Collins

Okay, maybe you're doing a bit of spring cleaning! That's fine! That's okay! I just really liked those solar panels. The higher quality solar panels contain more and better components, even if you had to tear them apart... It's also a good source of experience, experience in electrical and murdering poor solar panels.

- Katherine Collins

This is a bit much, don't you think? Disassembling this high of a quality solar panel will allow you to extract the electronic parts from the remains, along with some of the electrical grade silicon from the solar cells to be used in other solar panels.

That solar panel will never see the light of day again, but on the bright-, err, dark side, you have a bunch of new valuable electronics to make more of them... right?

- Katherine Collins

Maybe we could disassemble a different building? I really really like this one. It's shiny and purple! It shines in the light and gives us power for all of our cool buildings. No? Okay, whatever you want!

This very high quality solar panel contains more electronic parts and electrical grade silicon, along with a lot more experience in being a monster to those solar panels- I mean, electrical experience.

- Katherine Collins

This thing could've been an artifact in a different life! Are you really going to disassemble such an important cornerstone in our history? I mean, it's just a solar panel, but it can be so much more than that!

Well, okay not much more, but still, I really like solar panels. Maybe you should donate it instead, to a settler who won't grind up the solar panel? I think Lamp would have a great home for it... No? Fine. You will get a large amount of valuable electronics from this solar panel as well as a high amount of electrical XP.

- Katherine Collins

Smelter

Informational Guide on the Duskwork's Smelter and trivia on previous usage from the Ad Astra Landings.

While not the most immediate concern when landing on Mars, a smelting device housed within a large building able to process a large variety of ore into metal is incredibly useful for sustained existence on the planet. Ad Astra Development Zone features several hundred of these smelter modules outputting hundreds of tons of ingots per day using ore dug up from the Martian Regolith.

The Duskworks's smelters are a faithful recreation of the original smelters used on the Ad Astra Development Zone, albeit with some tweaks and changes to their efficiency. Including greater handling of byproduct and speed increases.

Red Planet smelting processes are a bit more complex than smelting back on Earth. In one example, smelting steel back on Earth involves the usage of coke to supplement the carbon needed to fabricate steel. On Mars however, large expeditionary mining and searching has never located any tracts of coal. Therefore, in order to create steel, massive distillers grab carbon dioxide out of the air and bring it within the smelter where it undergoes an electrolysis reaction to split the CO2 into carbon and oxygen.

"Electrolysis of carbonates in anhydrous environment can produce either or depending on conditions. A base, remaining in electrolyzed liquid then can capture carbon dioxide from other sources and be recirculated.

Reference: L. Massot, P. Chamelot, F. Bouyer, P. Taxil; Electrodeposition of carbon films from molten alkaline fluoride media. Electrochimica Acta, 2002, 47 (12), 1949-1957. "

-Answer by Stack Exchange Author:

The output chart for these recreated smelters are as follows:

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Smelter Rarity

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Sabatier Reactor

Informational Guide on the Duskwork's Sabatier Reactor and trivia on previous usage from the Ad Astra Landings.

The Sabatier reaction or Sabatier process produces methane and water from a reaction of hydrogen with carbon dioxide at elevated temperatures and pressures in the presence of a nickel catalyst. Aboard the long retired International Space Station, Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen are “waste” gasses. (CO2 from human respiration and H2 from the electrolization process to get O2 from water.). The ISS Sabatier device was integrated into the ISS water regeneration system to capture the water produced by the Sabatier process. The methane was vented outside of the space station and NASA hoped to use the methane as a rocket fuel source in future applications. Now our Martian engineers do not waste the methane and use it to power fuel cells, hoppers and rockets all over the surface of Mars. Our Martian Sabatier also uses H2 generated by splitting water along with CO2 condensed by a CAD to produce methane for the Chem Lab and plastics. The original hope of NASA to use the methane as a fuel source was achieved during the Ad Astra flights.

Further reading:

Ad Astra Development Zone uses massive sabatier devices in order to power the hoppers and rockets that are sent from the Ad Astra site back to Earth or various other martian settlements. These massive sabatier devices can be found within the industrial districts.